So now that the dragon lady was away, with an apparent rift developed between her and her plaything, I figured I’d find that apartment very empty. And the risk of being interrupted while I had my look around was little or no.
Getting in would be no problem. Getting in was never a problem around this place, in about any sense you can think of. The asshole who managed the place (the owner, old Bob Roberts, remember?) was never in his own apartment, as he considered that part of his function was servicing any of his tenants who were momentarily between playthings. He liked to tell his tenants his door was always open, and it was. So was his fly.
Anyway, I walked in one afternoon, found his master key in a drawer and took it to a Woolworth’s in the nearby good-size town, where I had a dupe made, returned his key, and got back in bed with Nancy, all in the course of fifty minutes.
I used to be good at picking locks, but got out of the habit. For what I’d been doing the past few years, I’d seldom needed tools of that sort, as most of my work was in the Midwest, where security tends to be lax, where most doors can be opened with a credit card, and there are lots of other ways to get in a place if you have to, easier ways than picking a lock, I mean, which honest-to-Christ requires daily practice. Anybody tells you picking locks is easy is somebody who doesn’t know how to pick locks.
I got out of the pool.
I put on my robe, went up the steps and inside, where I found the corridor empty and felt no apprehension at all as I worked the dupe of the owner/manager’s master key in the lock and went in. I turned on the lights (the windows of her apartment faced the ocean-front side of the building, so no one was likely to see them on, and even so, so what?) and began poking around.
The apartment itself was identical in layout to Nancy’s, except backwards, as this was on the opposite side of the hall. The decorating was very different, which surprised me: apparently each tenant could have her own decorating done, so where a wall in Nancy’s had pastel blue wallpaper, light color blue like Wisconsin summer sky, the dragon lady had shiny metallic silver wallpaper; other walls were standard dark paneling in either apartment, but in this one, for example, a gleaming metal bookcase-cum-knickknack rack jutted across the living room, cutting it in half, with few books on it and a lot of weird African-looking statues and some abstract sculptures made of glazed black something. And where in Nancy’s place there was a lot of wood, nothing furniture, everything antiques, this place had plastic furniture, metal furniture, glass furniture, all of it looking expensive and cheap at the same time.
In the bedroom, above the round waterbed, with its white silk sheets and black furry spread, was a painting. A black square with an immense red dot all but engulfing it. Nancy had a picture above her bed, too. An art nouveau print of a beautiful woman in a flowing scarf against a pastel background. Nancy had an antique brass bed. I had the feeling these girls weren’t two of a kind.
Meanwhile, I was going through things. The name she was using here was Glenna Cole, but I found identification cards of various sorts in several other names. The Broker’s name for her was Ivy. Knowing Broker’s so-called sense of humor, that probably came from poison ivy. Broker called me Quarry. Because (he said) a quarry is carved out of rock. The Broker’s dead now.
I found a gun. A spare, probably. She wouldn’t have taken her suitcases with her unless she was going off on a job. That was my guess, anyway, and it came from experience. Also, the gun was just a little purse thing, a pearl-handled. 22 automatic, and I imagined she used something a little heavier than that in her work. A. 38, at least. Speaking of which, I did find a box of. 38 shells behind some lacy panties in a drawer, and that substantiated my guesswork, as there was no gun here that went with these shells.
What I didn’t find was evidence of where she’d gone. I went through the wastebaskets, and I even went through a bag of garbage in her kitchen, and found nothing, no plane or bus reservation notice, no nothing. I even played the rubbing a pencil against the top blank sheet of a note pad trick, and while it seems to work on television, all I got for my trouble was dirty fingers.
I sat on an uncomfortable-looking comfortable couch in her living room and wondered what to do next.
That was when her boyfriend came in.
4
I said,“Who the hell are you?”
His mouth dropped open like a trap door.
“So who the hell are you?” I demanded again.
He cocked his head like a dog trying to comprehend its master, narrowing his eyes, making them seem more close-set than they really were.
“Well?” I said.
That’s the only way I know to handle a situation like that: turn the tables, put the shoe on the other foot, or whatever other cliche you want to use to describe what I was doing to him. It was the only way I knew that might avoid immediate violence. I don’t care for physical violence myself, and try to duck it whenever possible.
Especially when faced with a guy both bigger and stronger than me, facts made obvious by his standing there in swim trunks and towel, the latter flung casually over a classically muscular shoulder.
“Well, are you coming in or aren’t you?” I asked.
He pushed the door shut. His teeth were showing. He wasn’t smiling. But he was too confused to be violent. At the moment.
“I don’t know you,” he said.
“If I knew you,” I said, “would I be asking your goddamn name every couple seconds?”
His eyebrows were as light a blond as the hair on his head. His nose was small, almost feminine. He really was prettier-looking than the dragon lady. But nowhere near as interesting.
“You got a reason for being in Glenna’s room?” he said. His voice was medium-range, flat, uninteresting.
“Sure. Do you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do. I live here.”
“The hell you say.” I knew he did, of course, had seen the men’s clothing in the closet and in dresser drawers, and knew of the female domination of the place which meant any man here was living with whatever woman he served. What I didn’t know was how fast this asshole was, that he’d pull a wham/bam/thank-you-ma’am on that female counterpart of himself he’d gone off into the shadows with. I mean, even at the Beach Shore you spent the night with whoever you banged. Sometimes you stayed the month.
“Hey,” he said, sitting in a chair across from me, a glass coffee table separating us. “Hey, I’ve seen you someplace. You staying here with somebody? Have I seen you down by the pool?”
“I’m staying here. You might have seen me.”
“But we haven’t met.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m Norm Morrow.”
“Burt Thompson.”
We didn’t shake hands, by the way.
“Okay, then. Okay, Burt. Now we’re introduced. Now maybe you don’t mind going into what you’re doing in here?”
“I’m waiting for Glenna.”
“Glenna’s gone.”
“She’ll be back.”
“Not for a while, bud.”
“I’ll wait a while. And it’s Burt.”
“I don’t give a fuck it’s Henry Kissinger. I’m starting to get the idea you’re fucking around with me, and I don’t like it.”
“If you hadn’t gone fucking around with some other piece of ass but Glenna, maybe she wouldn’t have asked me up here.”
“That’s horseshit, pal.”
“How so?”
“Glenna doesn’t give a damn what I do while she’s gone, she’s gone sometimes a month at a time, and she doesn’t expect me to be a fucking priest, you know? It’s an understanding we got. And I’m beginning to understand something else… I had about enough of you. Now what is this really about?”
“All I know is she asked me up, asked me to stay on, maybe she just figured I’d pass the word onto you your welcome was worn out.. ”
“Hey. You were just leaving, sport.”
“I don’t want any trouble. You’re a whole lot stronger than me, I can see that. No need to go proving it.”